Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2021

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapters 1-17

Part 1, Chapters 18-35

Part 2, Chapters 1-13

Part 3, Chapters 1-19

Part 4, Chapters 1-20

Part 4, Chapters 21-41

Part 5, Chapters 1-25

Part 5, Chapters 26-50

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

The Psychological Impact of Discrimination and Challenging Shame and Injustice

Growing up as Latino and gay in the south in the 1980s, Ari becomes familiar with the psychological and emotional impact of discrimination. When he finally comes to terms with his orientation, Ari grapples with feelings of shame, regret, sadness, otherness, and despair. As the story progresses and as Ari continues to grow as a person and come into his identity, he learns to weather the effects of discrimination and confront his shame.

One notable source of shame and uneasiness is Ari’s blossoming sexuality. When Ari and Dante decide to become a romantic couple at the outset of the novel, Ari begins to wrestle with his sexual desire. As summer begins to wind down and the boys prepare for their final year of high school, Ari finds himself desperate to be alone with Dante. He hatches a plan to go camping, just the two of them, but lets the idea go, realizing that their parents would likely assume they had gone away to have sex. Though his desire to have sex with Dante is undeniable, Ari decides against pitching an away trip to his parents because “[he] didn’t want to be ashamed” (35). When Ari begins to feel a powerful sexual attraction to Dante is when “the word ‘shame’ [starts] loitering in [his] body” (35).

When Dante and Ari have sex for the first time on their camping trip, both boys walk away from the experience feeling happy and fulfilled. However, when they return home and realize their parents obviously know what they have been up to, Ari suddenly feels ashamed, “like [he]’d done something really dirty” (110). Though Ari feels it is “so easy just to be with Dante” (111), especially physically, he recognizes that what is perhaps not so easy is “learning to live in the world, with all of its judgments” (111). These judgments have a profound effect on Ari, so much so that they “make their way into [his] body” (111). The shame Ari feels about his sexuality is so powerful that it surpasses the psychological and manifests into a physical discomfort, which speaks to the widespread anti-gay bias that Ari is aware of and afraid to personally encounter.

At the funeral service for Diego Ortega, Cassandra’s older brother who was gay and died of AIDS, Ari notices a group of young men sitting in the very back of the church. Noticing a distinctive “look of sadness in their eyes,” and a “look as if they knew they weren’t welcome” in the church, Ari deduces that the men are gay contemporaries of Diego’s (158). That the men seem to have been banished to the back of the church—furthest away from Diego’s casket and out of everyone’s sight—is deeply upsetting to Ari. Ari recognizes that his anger stems from witnessing repeatedly how inhumanely society treats gay people. Though he does nothing to disrupt the service and call attention to the injustice he sees, Ari recognizes the anger he feels in this moment as something that “was never going to go away and that I’d better get used to it” (158).

Ari experiences a similar burst of anger and desire to challenge injustice when he witnesses one of his schoolmates getting bullied in the school parking lot one day. The victim of the attack is Rico, who Ari later learns is gay. When Ari witnesses the bullies call Rico a slew of anti-gay slurs, Ari jumps in to defend the boy. When the bullies run off, Ari considers “the way the world judged and misjudged certain people—and threw them away, erased their names from the map of the world—that was the way the whole system worked” (169). Ari decides that the only way to handle such a corrupt system was to “help people out when [he could] and give the world the finger” (169). At this point in the story, Ari can feel himself going through a significant change, one that makes him feel empowered to challenge systems of oppression and injustice.

The end of the novel sees Ari and Dante meeting up at the Louvre in Paris. Standing before their favorite painting, Ari is determined to weather the storms of discrimination with Dante, hellbent on fighting to stay in the world because “it was [theirs]” (377). Without considering whether other museum patrons might be watching, Ari kisses Dante in front of the painting. Unbothered by what others might think, Ari does not “ever want to stop kissing him” (377).

Imagining the Future in Times of Uncertainty

Ari often states that he feels lost in life. Though at the start of the novel he has come to terms with the fact that he is gay and wants to be in a romantic relationship with Dante, these major realizations lead not to clarity but only further confusion about who he is becoming and what his future might look like.

Early in the novel, once Ari and Dante’s romantic relationship has been established, Lilly assures her son, “You and Dante are going to map out a new world” (16). Though he is appreciative of his mother’s encouragement, Ari cannot help but assume “[he] was going to be a terrible cartographer” (16). Though the idea of mapping out a new world is intriguing, doing so would require that one have a reasonable grip on what there is to explore. Ari is not confident in his cartography abilities, which applies that he is still feeling lost and without direction. With summer ending and senior year looming ahead, Ari admits to his mother, “Sometimes I don’t know who I am […] and I don’t know what to do” (33). Though she reminds him that “no one is an expert at living” (33), Lilly admits that like Ari, she and Jaime are also at a loss for how to best help him prepare for the future. Parenting a gay child is a brand-new experience for the Mendozas, and their uncertainty about how to best support him makes it difficult to cut a clear path ahead. Lilly admits that she and Jaime “have to learn how to be cartographers too” (34).

After Ari and Dante’s first fight as a couple, Ari walks home feeling “as confused as [he] had ever been” (43). He decides then, “I was in over my head in this relationship with Dante” (43). Though Ari knows that he loves Dante, he “didn’t really know what that meant” (43). That Ari earnestly wonders “where […] love [was] supposed to take [him]” (43) is indicative of the uncertainty he feels regarding various aspects of his life. Though his relationship with Dante is the one thing he is certain about, his uncertainty about where that relationship might lead them suggests that this is unknown territory.

In a journal entry, Ari writes about the difficulties of mapping out a new world and imagining his future when the current “world is not a safe place for us” (116). He resents the cartographers who came before him and “did not leave a place for us to write our names on [their] map” (116). Later in the novel, Ari again feels discouraged and uncertain about the trajectory of his life, claiming, “[T]here was no imagining a future. Because the world we lived in censored our imaginations and limited what was possible” (192). Without the freedom to imagine his ideal future—one in which he is free to be himself without judgment—Ari cannot even begin to picture his future life because to do so would be to entertain “fantasy” (192). Disheartened, Ari believes that “the world [he] wanted to live in didn’t exist” (192).

By the novel’s end, Ari is determined to “map out our new nation” (377) with the help of his loved ones. The relationships that Ari manages to form and strengthen up to this point give him the courage he needs to begin to imagine a future for himself—despite any confusion and uncertainty he feels—and become “the cartographers of the new America” (377).

The Transformative Power of Friendship

Of all the important life lessons Ari learns throughout the course of the novel, one of the most meaningful is the power of friendship. Before forming a tight-knit friend group in his senior year of high school, Ari spends most of his free time alone. In fact, before Dante, Ari has lived his life without friends.

On the friendship front, things take a turn for the better when Ari attends a gathering to honor the death of Diego, Cassandra’s older brother. Given their history of mutual dislike for one another, Cassandra and Ari have a tense conversation at the gathering, with Cassandra assuming that Ari is disrespectful, cruel, and straight. When Ari tells her he is gay, this causes an immediate change in Cassandra’s tone and behavior. Her previous hostility and defensiveness toward him transforms into kindness. Before leaving her house, Cassandra promises her friendship to Ari. She also encourages him to befriend Susie and Gina, pledging their support to Ari. After establishing a new friendship with Cassandra, Ari writes in his journal that “a girl who was once a true enemy became a friend” (140). He notes, “No one in my life has ever become an instant friend,” but with Cassandra, “just like that, she has become important to me” (140). A name that “once meant something frightening” now “sounded like an invitation to a new world,” which suggests that Ari is both intrigued and glad to make a friend out of Cassandra (139).

Inspired by Cassandra’s advice, Ari decides to befriend Gina and Susie, two girls from school who have been trying to get close to him for years. To build trust and platonic intimacy—foundational elements of friendship—with Gina and Susie, Ari decides to come out to them. When he calls Susie to invite her over for lunch, she is surprised to hear from him, given that he has never called her before. Susie is ecstatic that Ari is finally ready to be friends with her and Gina and likens friendship to traveling, telling him, “We want so much for you to show us around your beautiful country” (146). Shortly after the call, Ari is overwhelmed with his decision and realizes he is scared: “the Ari I used to be was disappearing” (147). The experience of noticing this internal change in himself is so affecting that Ari ends up vomiting. That Ari is so shaken by his decision to finally make friends—one that will require vulnerability and openness—suggests that it is a monumental change and a step in a new direction.

Because Ari decides to invite Gina and Susie into his world so quickly after befriending Cassandra speaks to the profound affect that the mere idea of friendship has on him. Cassandra’s promise of loyalty and support coupled with the knowledge that Gina and Susie already harbor friendly feelings toward him pushes Ari out of his comfort zone and into the realm of friendship.

Though he experiences some initial anxiety about it, making new friends proves to have an extremely positive affect on Ari. Once, after running into Gina at the Charcoaler and bonding over their mutual love of eating alone in their cars listening to music, Ari realizes that he very much enjoys “living in the country of friendship” (189).

When Ari receives a thoughtful Christmas gift from Susie and Gina, he considers it to be something of a shield, something meaningful that “would protect [him]” (238). In a journal entry he writes later that day, he notes that he does not “feel that loneliness when [he’s] alone anymore” and that he is “more comfortable spending time with the Ari I have become” (238). Referring to himself as “the Ari I have become” (238) after opening Gina and Susie’s gift suggests that their friendship—and the concept of friendship in general—has rendered a significant change in Ari’s idea of who he is and how he feels about himself.

When Ari’s father dies, his friends are the first to come to his aid. Though Ari does not feel like being around them, he appreciates them for simply being present while he grieves. When his friends tell him that they will serve as his new Tito—Tito being the stuffed bear he slept with as a child to feel comforted—he realizes that “they would all be my friends forever” (276). The consistent care and support they show in their friendship with Ari forces him to realize that “they would always be in [his] life” and that he “would always love them” (276).